Exhibition at Dreitzer features students' photos, sculptures

A wide variety of moods and media is evident in the work

A selection of sculpture and photography by students on exhibit in the Dreitzer Gallery until March 22.

By Se Jun LeeMarch 17, 2013

“Dimensions 3,” an exhibition of students’ photography and sculpture, opened recently in the Dreitzer Gallery.

Students from the Introduction to Photography course self-curated their exhibit, titled, “The Ink Can Bury a Blade,” while the sculpture portion of the exhibition, which is untitled, was curated by members of the faculty. Both exhibits will be open until March 22.

Several of the sculptures were made out of cardboard, a medium that Abrams’ students became familiar with in the course of two projects.

Students in his “Reinventing the Third Dimension” New Media course first created their pieces in Google SketchUp, then had the cardboard professionally laser-cut. They then assembled the pieces as they saw fit. Students in Introduction to Three-Dimensional Design replicated an everyday object on a different scale using cardboard.

“These classes are about entertaining those left turns that occur in the process of making something and embracing mistakes,” Abrams said. “It’s a different way to learn.”

Other works completed by students in Architectural Drawing and Design, Intermediate Sculpture II and Sculpture in the Age of New Media vary in size, shape, and medium, which ranges from wires to clay molds.

Joseph Jacobowitz ’14, Anna Yatskar ’14 and Sofia Retta ’15 took leadership of “The Ink Can Bury a Blade” exhibit, which is mounted on the wall opposite the sculptures. According to their description, the photographs attempt to capture “such overwhelming and terrifying might that we temporarily neglect our sense of self and feel awe and security rather than fear.” Wiener helped them refine their ideas and image selections.

In an attempt to “command our individual formal and theoretical purposes” as photographers, the students’ description says, the exhibition addresses contrary notions of “vulnerability and power, serenity and chaos, closeness and detachment.”

“During last fall and spring semesters I began to notice a trend toward the unsettling in much of the student photographic work,” said Wiener. “The title for the show is a case in point; it reflects the printer's ink and its masking or burial of 'the unsettling' beneath the photographed subjects, which find their expression in the seven series on display.”